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Fr. George Rutler, of Our Saviour’s Church in Manhattan, has a blistering, delightful review of Piero Marini’s book on the reform of the liturgy in the newest edition of First Things. Since it’s only for subscribers now, I thought I’d pull a couple of choice bits out to encourage people to read the whole thing. It’s a sore point among traditional Catholics, but I maintain that, whatever unfortunate material sometimes appears on its pages, First Things is a magazine that should be read by most thoughtful Catholics. But leaving that argument for later, a bit from Fr. Rutler:
“To young people today, Vatican II reposes in a haze with Nicaea II and Lateran II. Their guileless ignorance at least frees them from the animus of some aging liturgists who thought that the Second Vatican Council defined a whole new anthropological stage in the history of man. The prolix optimism of many interpreters of that council has now taken on a patina—not that of fine bronze but more like the discoloration of a Bauhaus building.”
“[T]his thin, even epistemologically anorexic, book will long be of interest to ecclesiologists as they study its awkward ballet of resentments and vindications of the sort commonly found in youthful diaries that were not burned in maturity.”
“Prescinding from the claim that the liturgists did their preparatory work “patiently and humbly since October 1963 with the pope’s support” in order to be “more pastoral,” Marini fuels the suspicions of conspiracy theorists by admitting: “Unlike the reform after Trent,” the liturgical reform after Vatican II “was all the greater because it also dealt with doctrine.””
“Marini is not a slave to the principle of noncontradiction. ”
“Marini complains about “a certain nostalgia for the old rites.” In doing so, he contradicts Pope Benedict’s distinction between rites and uses, and he also fails to explain why nostalgia for the 1560s is inferior to nostalgia for the 1960s, except for the dentistry.”
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I especially like the whole part about the liturgists “who thought that the Second Vatican Council defined a whole new anthropological stage in the history of man.” Very Teilhard de Chardin! (Does anyone read him anymore?)
It is really ridiculous that many churchman and laity thought that the sixties were so special that we would want to see them for hundreds upon hundreds of years after they had passed. I suppose other ages had historical narcissism. Some in the Vatican II generation thought that theirs was more important than everyone else’s.
I believe that the 1960’s will prove to be a sad and deforming era in the Church if not Western Civilization when scholars and students will look back and say what were they thinking. A small vignette when attending to a priest as a patient the discussion of hemoglobinopathies came up(sickle cell and thalassemias) these being adaptive in malarial invested areas. The ancient Romans drained the swamps removing the “bad air”, In pointing this out I asked if this 37 yo priest ever took Latin. He said no.
As someone raised with the OF or Novus Ordo I still am flabbergasted. What were they thinking? How stupid can you be to strike this from the curriculum? This would seem to be a basic requirement for any Latin rite priest. We need another Charles Borromeo.
JPG